The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  You know her then? She’s a photographer?

  She’s new. She asked to go. She needs someone to help her out. We all did, didn’t we?

  She looks like that actress, said Daniel.

  She looks like Joan of Arc, said their future emissary to Chechnya.

  I can’t quite picture her in Cité Soleil, Tom said.

  Don’t you guys sell her short, said the woman from the Post. She doesn’t back off. She handled herself well.

  Who’s she work for?

  No one just yet. She has some names, contacts. So that’s it, the Post photographer sighed and stood up. Good luck, everyone. I have a plane to catch.

  Without a word, the red-haired photographer from Colorado stood up as well, lifted his bag over his shoulder and descended the steps to the parking lot and into oblivion. The large group at the pushed-together tables began to break up; accounts were settled, embraces exchanged, drivers summoned. The gear, piles of it, humped away. The Japanese photographer finished cleaning his lenses and replaced them in a foam-lined case with the care and delicacy of explosive charges.

  Daniel said that he and his wife were hosting a dinner that evening for stay-arounds, but Tom told him sorry, he had made other arrangements and couldn’t make it. Then Jackie was there at the table, asking to buy black-and-white film, if anyone had extra. She looked ready for the streets—a tan cotton vest over her T-shirt, olive-green slacks, hiking boots, camera bag, a huge Nikon strapped around her elegant neck, her expression unnecessarily grave, a slight urgency in her voice. It struck Tom, as it had that night at the Kinam, that she was without charm, and perhaps that was her intention, a way of muting or dampening the blaze of her physical appeal.

  He offered her a seat but she didn’t acknowledge the invitation. The Japanese photographer rummaged through his bag and found six rolls of Tri-X and she made no objection when he gave her the film and wouldn’t take anything for it but karmic goodwill.

  So what’s happening today? she asked with her eyes darting along a line somewhere above their heads.

  Zed, zero, zip. Everybody’s pulling out, said Daniel, but no sooner had he spoken than the walkie-talkie began to fizz, and they listened to the crackled report of his colleague checking in. A roadblock, a protest, tires burning on the highway in front of Cité Soleil, a commonplace excitement but Daniel was the last man chained to the story and his presence was required. Anybody want to come along? he asked and Tom expected Jackie to jump at the chance but she said no.

  What do you want to happen today? he asked her. She was beautiful and he didn’t know her and it would be a game, he thought, to get to know her.

  Can I sit and have a cup of coffee with you guys? she asked as she pulled out a chair and sat. Impossible that anyone had ever told her no.

  The conversation did not flow. She talked haltingly for a few minutes with the Japanese photographer about editors and magazines and syndicates and then he, too, joined the exodus to the airport. Her coffee arrived and she sat stirring sugar into it, clearly uncomfortable, and so he stopped watching her and asked the simplest question—about her home, where she came from. She jerked her posture straight from her intense, nervous hunch and met his eyes and Tom didn’t think she had even heard what he said but instead asked a question of her own.

  Are you busy today?

  Impossibly, he joked, hoping she would suggest a common adventure, an enterprise through which he might invent some small usefulness to Jackie, a mutual purpose that would legitimize his interest in her. Something in him—not his heart—reached toward her; he was neither a fool nor a lecher but certainly a man intrigued by the myriad possibilities that, at least on the surface, her youth and beauty and intrepidness implied. In fact, he explained, since she didn’t seem to pick up on his sarcasm, I have a thousand things to do but nobody in the government seems to want to work today.

  I don’t want to get in your way, she said, and the hint of adolescent whine in her tone annoyed him, as if now, after cracking a window to the possibility of their companionship, she felt compelled by fickleness to close it without delay, the come-here-get-away dance of teenage girls, woefully familiar to teenage boys and a glum memory for their older selves.

  You in my way actually sounds pretty good, he flirted, without an effect on her expression, and he began to wonder if she ever retreated far enough from the constant tension of her self-control to smile. Then Tom himself became more serious and wanted her to tell him why she was here, just arriving when everyone else couldn’t jump ship fast enough.

  The UN isn’t leaving, she said. The Haitians aren’t leaving.

  Point taken, Tom said, for what it’s worth. Then he couldn’t help himself and he lapsed into a grand soliloquy, like every other horse’s ass who had ever sat too long on the veranda of the Oloffson. And for what it’s worth, he continued, the pictures of ordinary people, the ones mired in pathos, bearing the weight of it all, right? Rather than the sensational images or the images that disseminate information, it’s those pictures that explain the most, or have the deepest impact, but first somebody must care, and you know exactly what I mean, care deeply and honestly, and right now people are very, very weary of caring about Haiti, so best of luck because I think you’re going to need it. He pontificated, his lawyer’s mouth running away from him. Personally, Tom said, I can no longer believe in that which demands we see things anew. I think that perspective is fundamentally dishonest, I think it’s a fucking lie. How about, instead, images and words that make us finally see what we’ve been staring at blind and dumb for most of our daydreaming lives. To see things anew makes it sound like insight awaits those who can’t make sense out of seeing things as they are, as if our innocence and inexperience were actually virtues. What do you think? You think in pictures, don’t you?

  But she did not want to philosophize about photography or altruism or ways of seeing and his own impulse toward abstractions seemed suddenly not passionate but tedious and didactic.

  Can I ask you something? she said. Do you know about voodoo?

  Know what about vodou? he repeated skeptically but thought, aha. With her question, the brooding enigma of Jacqueline Scott seemed to deflate into the banal. He guessed she wanted to hear the drums, sweat in the pagan heat and immerse herself in Haiti’s timeless theater of light and darkness. If you could not explain what you were doing in a place like Haiti, here was a genuine reason that required no attachment of war or revolution or screaming horror or saintly crusade. You were, you could tell yourself, a tourist of the spirit. You were drawn by the mysteries, such as they were.

  Is it a real thing? she asked, and Tom found it somewhat disconcerting, the repellent pained transparency of need in the way she asked the question.

  I’m not sure what you mean.

  I mean, it’s a religion, right?

  A religion, yes, I suppose. Another way of looking at the universe, a way to try to understand what’s in God’s mind. If you choose to see it that way.

  How do you choose to see it? she said.

  With due respect. A way of looking at, and trying to understand, power. Spiritual power, political power—they’re inseparable anyway, aren’t they?

  Which was not to say vodou, much like Catholicism, had not burdened many of its practitioners with superstition and fear, he explained. The potions and powders, some of them anyway, were real; zombies, however rare, were real; spirit possession, he could assure her, was no joke, unless you were a species of white fraud hoping to bluff your way into the melodrama of it. And yet still, in its daily manifestations, vodou was a strong, good thing, he told her—it was Haiti’s only strong, good thing, the expression of the abiding spirit of the people, the expression of survival. Whatever it was beyond that expression, or beneath it, was not for Tom or any blan to say, and existed if at all as a curiosity for educated me
n and women, the theater of the African genesis, at best an anthropological pursuit. Or, shamelessly, a type of neoprimitive entertainment, a game of the occult that whites played with blacks, perhaps to scare themselves, to flirt with the macabre, perhaps to feel liberated and unrestrained in their contempt for the answers their own world had provided, or failed to provide.

  To see herself anew—and what was the American dream if not this?—was that what Jacqueline Scott wanted? Or to find herself in mankind’s ancient past, and see herself clearly, as she always was and would be? Transcend, or descend, or howl at the magic of the freaking moon? Tom had no idea. Americans were not built to take these matters seriously until their faces were rubbed in the awfulness they sometimes made when they were seized by the exalted passion to remake the world.

  Her request, her original request, was predictable, what any tourist might crave in Haiti if Haiti had tourists—she wanted to meet priests, the houngans. Of course he readily agreed and she accepted his proposition of a daylong excursion out to the countryside, where she had never been, rather than spend their time gagging in Port-au-Prince’s traffic, crawling over the frying-pan heat of the road to Carrefour to visit Max Beauvoir—a cyberliterate houngan who spent more time on the Internet than in his peristyle—or patrolling the stack of Bel Air’s sinister maze of neighborhoods, cousin by cousin, trying to track down Abujah, the video cameraman, a stringer for the networks, who had become the heir apparent to vodou’s throne. Instead Tom suggested a short trip via Route Nationale One to Saint-Marc, a port an hour and a half up the coast on Gonave Bay, where, on the town’s outskirts, a temple, padlocked and shuttered during the occupation, had, he noticed on his last expedition into the northern mountains, raised its flags and repainted its exterior murals and presumably was back in service, come one come all.

  The only tricky detail was they had to leave that minute to be back by dinnertime but Jackie said, Let’s go! Good girl, Tom replied, relieved to have finally inspired her spontaneity. Everything about her so far, especially her callow questions about vodou—he thought she could have read a book, for Christ’s sake, before she got on the plane—had impressed him as naive and untested, though for the first time she offered him her smile. Not warmly, though, it was as if mocking his approval of her readiness, her implicit availability, his little pat on the back.

  They hoisted their shoulder bags and moved into the assault of sunlight and he was already sweating out his half-dozen cups of coffee by the time they descended the Oloffson’s steps to the car park and his rental. At the end of the driveway Tom pulled over and collected Gerard from beneath the coconut palms, the happiness draining from his face when he realized he had been demoted to passenger. He slid stiff-limbed into the backseat, not his regular place and certainly not his preferred, but he was intuitive enough to decline when Jackie, who showed no interest in him otherwise, offered to switch.

  By the time Tom had navigated through the wretched chicken coop of a city to its leafy outskirts and the open road, he had begun to feel joy, the most appropriate response to escaping Port-au-Prince.

  Jackie did not say much, and Tom considered her silence a virtue. He was perfectly at ease driving for hours without sharing a thought with whoever his companions might be, and he generally found talkative passengers distracting from the manifold hazards of the road. Nor did he talk about Jackie to himself—he was not willing anything to happen between them, but letting things happen as they may. He was little more than a harmless parasite on her beauty, which seemed so dismayingly separate from her other traits—a paradox but an irrelevance as well and not so troubling as the wide margin for error we grant those among us who are beautiful and nothing else.

  They drove out into the glare of the barren coast, the mangrove swamps and copses of thorn acacia of Tintayen sloped uninvitingly toward the bright sea, along the alluvial plain of a valley funneling upward to the mountains of the interior. She rummaged with increasing frustration in her camera bag for sunglasses and Tom was glad she could not find them because already her eyes were inscrutable. Instead she settled for lemon drops, turning in her seat to pass the bag to Gerard and then pausing for a short conversation with him that seemed more curt than polite. Did he have a family? Yes, a wife and two children. Did his wife work? No. How old were the children? Were the schools satisfactory? Where did he learn English? Tom waited for her to plumb the angry shadows of Gerard’s feelings, but she did not ask him anything that would not appear on an application for a visa or a bank loan.

  Nor did she offer any comment on the ever more rugged spectacle of the countryside or the hapless peasants trudging the rut of footpaths following the road, and Tom wondered if she was overwhelmed by the strangeness of Haiti, or even stunned by its unexpected though ravaged magnificence. Whatever preoccupied her, she would allow almost nothing to penetrate its envelope, which made her a rather ideal traveling companion, accepting without complaint or censure the heat, the roughness of the road, his hell-bent driving, the fate of the Haitians. Still, she exerted a slight but constant counterweight against Tom’s own happiness, a humorless neurotic, no more carefree than a penitent, which he supposed she was, and the trip seemed less and less like a lark than a task or mission, which was exactly what he had hoped to avoid this day in Haiti, the outsider’s relentless sense of obligation.

  Are you enjoying this? he finally asked, and again it was as if she would not hear him but seemed to grow more unrelaxed and tense in her seat, fidgeting her body but staring straight out the windshield at the miles flying before them. They were hurtling through an arid, corroded landscape, the foothills brambled with cactus and thorny scrub and above them a tremendous wall of emaciated mountainsides and bone-white peaks once crowned by forests, mountains like a queue of cancer patients. He thought in her agitation she might be carsick but she flatly dismissed Tom’s suggestion that they stop for a moment and stretch their legs.

  A few minutes later Tom sensed her attention on him and glanced over to see her studying his face, her lips pursed but her expression otherwise blank. He looked back at the road and then back at her and she was still intent on trying to see him, the unflinching scrutiny of a woman who wants to know if she can trust a man, but if that was the case he wasn’t pleased she was taking so long to make up her mind.

  What is it with you? he said.

  I have to ask you something, she said, but as soon as the words left her mouth she averted her eyes and shook her head, regretting her decision, or perhaps not, perhaps she intended to be cajoled.

  He knew not to say anything and waited but then he gave in and said, Go ahead. Ask.

  She was looking at her knees, her head bowed, her hair streaming back from the breeze of their open windows, her pained face in exquisite profile and just then he slammed into a pothole that made her grab the dashboard and jerk herself upright, wearing a new look of determination.

  You can’t think I’m silly, Jackie said, not a plea but a cool demand. I don’t want you to laugh. If you laugh I’m getting out of the car.

  What was she going to do—hail a cab? Tom glanced over his shoulder at Gerard to check his reaction to such a threat coming from such a person in such a place, which was itself reason to laugh, and they lifted their eyebrows at one another in stone-faced amusement.

  I won’t laugh, Tom promised and instantly her words rushed out into a question that was a type of falling or jumping, although he did not immediately recognize its nature because he had never met a woman anywhere in the world who was so defiantly literal and without irony. Tom wanted her to be cute, a ditz, a sexy ideologue, a glib bitch, a camera junkie, a news hound, a crusader, anything but this—literal and seemingly unschooled and tormented and wrapped as tight as you get before you explode.

  Do you think it’s possible, she began, and with the drop in her voice Tom leaned over to hear her better, for someone to lose their soul?

&nb
sp; He made a token effort to ponder the question. Sure. What do you think, Gerard?

  I don’t know, said Gerard. It’s possible, maybe.

  You’re lying. What kind of a Haitian are you? Tom said, grinning into the rearview mirror and then looking over at Jackie. If there’s anybody in this car who believes you can lose your soul, it’s the Haitian, not the Americans.

  You’re not taking this seriously, she said.

  He thought it would only make things infinitely worse between them if he explained that right now everybody in Haiti was taking this outlandish question quite seriously indeed—the Green Berets, the houngans, the Baptist missionaries, the Catholic priests. Any villager in the hinterlands would eventually tell you the village’s number-one problem was loup-garous—werewolves—coming to their huts at night and stealing their babies’ souls, gobbling them up like werewolf vitamins, and then in the morning of course the baby would be dead and cemented into the statistical afterlife of Haiti’s horrific infant mortality rate.

  Just forget it, said Jackie.

  Too late, said Tom. He had suspected she was being frivolous and theatrical about matters that did not fare well in casual conversation. He thought she was asking about vodou again, teasing herself with the undercurrent of its diabolique, but again he had misunderstood her. Let’s start over, he said, if you actually want to have a real conversation. Do I believe in God? I could believe in God in Latin, or in any other language incomprehensible to me, but I cannot believe in God in English. English exposed everything wrong about our approach toward a supreme being, the core platitudes of the institutions behind the ritual, and I’m not even going to tell you what I think about the politics of religion. So I suppose you might say I believe in the mystery of God and I don’t appreciate anybody fucking with that mystery or trying to grease it for me if I’m having trouble swallowing. Do you want me to go on?